It is known to produce carpet tiles in the form of a pile surface bonded to a PVC backing and various methods and apparatus have been used in such production. These carpet tiles have proved extremely durable but because PVC is an oil-derived product the manufacturing costs of such carpet tiles have recently escalated and attention has been given to alternative backing compositions. There have been proposals previously to use atactic polypropylene (APP) as a backing composition but these proposals have not been of such a detailed nature as would permit production on a commercial basis and the technology developed for PVC backing is not directly applicable to APP because the physical chemistry of the two materials is entirely different.